NO THEME IS MORE CENTRAL to the history of the
second millennium than the rise of the West. Perhaps no educational
task is more
urgent since the attacks of September 11, 2001, than to gain a
clear understanding of the history of relations between Islam and
the West. The voyages of Ibn Battuta, the world’s greatest
pre-modern traveler, focus our attention on the critical turning
points leading to the divergent paths between Islam and the West
over the past six centuries.

In lectures throughout
the state of Washington, Don Holsinger speaks on “The
Travels of Ibn Battuta,” “Abraham’s Triple
Heritage” and “Africa’s Hidden Treasures.” The
map behind Holsinger depicts routes traveled by Ibn Battuta.

Exploring when and how those paths
diverged may enable two great civilizations to rediscover how much
they have in common and to embark on a course of respectful co-existence
and renewed cooperation in the 21st century.

Ibn Battuta’s remarkable travels at the dawn of the modern
global age help us to ask the right questions. How did Europe emerge
as the center of a modern global system? What explains the acceleration
of change in the West? Why not in the Middle East, China, India
or one of a number of other regions? The answers are less obvious
than traditionally assumed and remain intensely debated and researched
by historians. The answers are also relevant to decisions that
will shape the 21st century.

Ibn Battuta was born into a Moroccan family of Muslim legal scholars
in 1304. After studying law, he left in 1325 for the hajj, the
pilgrimage to Mecca required of Muslims who are financially and
physically able to accomplish it. As he circled Mecca’s Grand
Mosque, observing fellow pilgrims of diverse languages, races,
and ethnic and geographic origins, he must have realized that he
would be welcomed anywhere in that enormous inter-communicating
world stretching from West Africa to East Asia.

For the next three decades, he traveled continuously, covering
an estimated 73,000 miles, an area comprising more than 40 countries
on today’s world map. His travels highlight the remarkable
unity of the 14th century Afro-Eurasian world and the central role
that Islam played in providing the webs of security, stability
and communication across the greater part of it.

On his way to Mecca, Ibn Battuta passed through Egypt, Palestine
and Syria. Later he toured Iraq and Persia and then sailed down
the east coast of Africa, reaching what is today Tanzania. Following
his return to the Persian Gulf, he headed for the Muslim Sultanate
of India, taking a circuitous route through Anatolia, passing through
the Christian city of Constantinople before traversing the plains
of West Central Asia, finally arriving at the Sultanate of Delhi,
where he served as a judge.

“I left Tangier, my birthplace,
the 13th of June 1325 with the intention of making the
Pilgrimage to [Mecca].… to leave all my friends
both female and male, to abandon my home as birds abandon
their nests.”JOURNALS OF IBN BATTUTA

The young Muslim lawyer called China “the safest and most
agreeable country in the
world for the traveler.” Ironically,
it was here that Ibn Battuta experienced his severest culture shock,
admitting that he “stayed indoors most of the time and only
went out when necessary.” Such an odd response by one of
the world’s most cosmopolitan travelers is explained by the
fact that until that moment, his experiences had reinforced an
assumption that the spread of Islam was synonymous with the spread
of civilization. Chinese culture was neither Muslim nor had an
interest in becoming so, and yet it was as advanced as any culture
that he had encountered. China challenged his cultural chauvinism.

Ibn Battuta returned to Morocco just ahead of the advancing frontier
of Bubonic Plague that would ravage much of the Eastern Hemisphere.
Following a brief visit to Muslim Spain, he embarked on his last
great adventure, crossing the Sahara Desert and visiting the impressive
West African kingdom of Mali before returning home to record his
life experiences.

Had Ibn Battuta been told during his last years that one part of
the world was about to gain unprecedented power and mastery over
the rest of the world, which region would he have chosen? It is
possible to construct a variety of plausible answers to the question.
The exercise forces us to define for ourselves what we mean by “development” and
to identify those cultural, political, economic and technological
factors that we see as keys to the formation of our modern global
system.

Had Ibn Battuta placed his bets on China as the future center
of power, the events of the first decades of the 15th century would
have appeared to vindicate his prediction. Between 1405 and 1433,
seven gigantic naval expeditions set sail from China, eventually
reaching as far as East Africa. China appeared to be on the verge
of discovering the water route around the tip of Africa. One can
imagine a huge Chinese fleet sailing into European harbors at
the end of the 15th century rather than European vessels sailing
into Asian harbors. Had Ibn Battuta predicted that the small Anatolian
state that he passed through would be the future center of Ottoman
Turkish power, he would undoubtedly have felt vindicated had he
lived to witness the Golden Age under Sulayman the Magnificent
in the mid-16th century.

The point is that Ibn Battuta might have
anticipated a number of different scenarios, but he would never
have imagined the one that in fact came to pass: a relatively backward
and marginal part of the Afro-Eurasian world called Europe gaining
unprecedented mastery over virtually all of the Eastern Hemisphere
and a yet-unknown New World.

What then were the keys to Europe’s subsequent rise? The
traditional answer emphasizes cultural revolutions we call the
Renaissance
and Reformation, out of which came the rise of science, the expansion
of capitalism, the development of representative government, and
an expanding spiral of modern benefits emphasizing individualism,
free will and reason. Another interpretation argues that Europe’s
development also needs to be viewed within a global context. This
line of reasoning emphasizes a partly accidental series of discoveries
initiated in 1415 with the Portuguese defeat of Morocco and capture
of the African city of Ceuta, which became a base for Portuguese
expansion.

The first decades of the 15th century signaled China as the promising
center of a global system. The last decade of the 15th century
witnessed a China withdrawn from the sea lanes, and two Iberian powers,
Portugal
and Spain, sponsoring three voyages that would knit together the
world as a unit for the first time.
These included Bartolomeo
Dias’ discovery
of a water route around the South African Cape in 1488 and Vasco
da Gama’s arrival in India via the Cape Route in 1498. Mid-way
between the two voyages, Christopher Columbus, also seeking the
spices of Asia, stumbled upon the Americas.

Adam Smith, the Enlightenment’s most astute economic historian,
noted in 1776 the significance of this “decade that changed
the world”: “The discovery of America, and that of
a passage to the Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest
and most important events recorded in the history of mankind. … By
opening a new and inexhaustible market to all the commodities of
Europe, it gave occasion to new divisions of labour and improvements
of art, which, in the narrow circle of ancient commerce, could
never have taken place. … To the natives, however, of both
the East and West Indies, all the commercial benefits which can
have resulted from those events have been sunk and lost in the
dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned.”

The impact of the discoveries was not as sudden or dramatic in
the Middle East as in the Americas, where the unintended introduction
of diseases wiped out entire populations. However, the Middle East’s
central location as crossroads of the Eastern Hemisphere was altered
as ships increasingly bypassed it. A region that had long been
the cradle of world civilization became increasingly marginalized,
the Industrial Revolution providing the final instruments of outside
control.

Yet history is full of irony; over the past century, geography
has once again thrust the Middle East into the center of world
attention with the discovery of oil and natural gas deposits that
provide the world with its energy lifeblood. Those who live in
the Middle East today are forced to ask themselves whether that
black
gold has been more of a blessing or a curse.

Ibn Khaldun, a North African contemporary of Ibn Battuta, is rightly
considered the first modern historian. This 14th-century Tunisian’s
insights into the nature of history have lost none of their sharpness. “The
writing of history requires numerous sources and greatly varied
knowledge. It also requires a good speculative mind and thoroughness… The
capital of knowledge that an individual scholar has to offer is
small. Admission of one’s shortcomings saves from censure.
Kindness from colleagues is hoped for. It is God whom I ask to
make our deeds acceptable in His sight. He is a good protector.”

That spirit of honest and humble truth-seeking is an honored tradition
in both the Christian and the Islamic worlds. It deserves to be
nurtured and renewed. The words of a contemporary Tunisian historian,
Muhammad Talbi, continue that tradition and offer hope for the
future of relations between Islam and the West at the dawn of the
21st century. “Neither Islam, nor any other theistic faith,
has any other choice today than to accept adventure,” says
Talbi. “For science is every day setting further and further
forward the frontiers of mystery and of the universe and, so doing,
poses questions from which neither philosophers nor theologians
can excuse themselves without a radical and fundamental denial
of humanity. ... We have this need of urgently hearkening to God
today, with contemporary ears, in the insistent present.”

A Brief History of Relations Between Islam and
the West

For the past 14 centuries, since the rise of Islam in seventh-century
Arabia, the civilizations centered at the two ends of the
Mediterranean have struggled to understand each other. Those
with power are
always tempted to confuse power with intellectual superiority,
with virtue or with both. The value of examining 14 centuries
of relations between the Middle East and the West is that
the dramatic shifts in power undermine such arrogant assumptions
on both sides and remind us how much the two civilizations
have in common and how much they have borrowed from each other.

· The
rapid expansion of Arab-Muslim power following Muhammad’s life
in the seventh century gathered a vast area, extending from
Spain in the West to India in the
East, under a single political authority, planting seeds of mutual hostility
between Western Christendom and Islamdom during the formative stages of both
civilizations. Exaggerated images of the fearsome, violent and barbaric nature
of “the other” imbedded themselves in the language, literature and art of both
civilizations
· Frankish Crusaders from the Western Mediterranean regained the offensive momentum
during the 12th and 13th centuries, gaining control of the Holy Land for a
while, the periods of warfare etching more deeply the negative myths on both
sides.

·
With the dramatic rise of Ottoman Turkish Islam in the 15th and 16th
centuries, the balance of power shifted again to the Eastern Mediterranean,
creating genuine
fears in the West of being overwhelmed by the forces of Islam. The 1453 fall
of Constantinople, the last bastion of Byzantine power, and the subsequent
Ottoman sieges of Vienna in the heart of Europe, became potent symbols of the
recurring “threat
from the East,” adding yet another layer of negative imagery in the collective
consciousness of the West.
·
The 18th-century industrial transformation — first of England, and then
of other parts of Europe and North America — dramatically altered the
relations between the West and the Middle East, as it did relations between
the West and
the rest of the world. The tools of expansion arising from the Industrial Revolution,
comprising weapons, railroads, steamships, telegraphs and quinine, subjected
much of the Middle East and the larger Muslim world to European domination,
leaving a legacy of humiliation and resentment still deeply felt.
· Further
adding to widespread feeling of resentment mixed with envy in the Middle East
has been
the conflict over Palestine since the last decades of the 19th century. The
rise of Jewish nationalism (Zionism), largely in reaction to an upsurge of
European anti-Semitism, culminated in the establishment of Israel and the frustration
of Palestinian national hopes in 1948. Over the following decades, Israel served
as a Western “window” on the Middle East. Its chronic insecurity
in the face of Arab hostility reinforced Western, and in particular American,
images of the Islamic world as aggressive, intolerant and hostile to Western
values.
· The resurgence of Islam over the past quarter century, most
dramatically demonstrated in the Iranian revolution of 1979 that replaced
an American-allied tyrant with a traditionalist Muslim tyrant, revived and
hardened
deep-seated prejudices between the Middle East and the West. The subsequent
rise of increasingly militant Islamic movements, supported at times by the
United States to facilitate the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union,
culminated
in the terrorist attacks of September 11, carried out by a tiny fanatical organization
in the name of Islam and overwhelmingly condemned by the world’s one
billion Muslims.

— DON HOLSINGER

Don Holsinger enjoys teaching, whether the course is “The
West and the World” or “The Rise of Islamic Civilization,” and
he extends his classroom statewide in public lectures for the “Inquiring
Mind” program of the Washington Commission for the Humanities.
Ever since the first Gulf War in 1991, churches, community groups,
cultural organizations and news media have sought out Holsinger’s
well-researched historical perspectives on Islamic peoples, cultures
and civilization.

With a Ph.D. from Northwestern University, Holsinger has taught at SPU since
1990. In 2000, he was part of a Christian Peacemaker Team that patrolled the
tense boundary between the Israeli and Palestinian-controlled sections in the
West Bank city of Hebron.